And typically in those large projects, we would see change orders that would be a very significant in size. And so really, those projects are – when you reach the conclusion of them and deliver those outcomes, they’re much larger than you had anticipated. And so you certainly have much better leverage on the investment that you made to capture and originally set up and deliver those projects. So over a long period of time, they can end up having much better margins than we would see typically in our design business.
Lara Poloni: And Jamie, with respect to the capabilities that we brought to the table with a great grid win, certainly, our number one position in environment was a big factor. So environmental and energy grid design, we’re seeing is a particularly labor-constrained submarket in the UK. So the fact that we bring not just the local environmental credentials, but the global leading position was a significant factor in that win. But when we look at the broader energy transition, there are many capabilities that we bring globally. So with generation, we’re supporting with permitting and design work. Transmission and distribution, we’re a leading firm for consulting and broader planning services. And then, of course, the water component of these projects is considerable. And so our market-leading position in water across all the disciplines is another key contributor to the infrastructure that’s required for pumping for any aspect of energy transition.
Gaurav Kapoor: Good morning, Jamie, this is Gaurav. Good to hear from you again. I’ll answer – I’ll respond to the margin question you asked. Our margins in Americas are very healthy and robust. Even at 18% what we delivered in the quarter, they’re at the top of the peer group, public peer group. But to your specific question and what my remark was we spent more BB than we had planned and still delivered on that 18% margin. So let me just give you a little bit more color what do I mean by that. When we set our plan and we commit to deliver on our margin targets, they’re at the consolidated enterprise level. And also, when we set those plans, we always include BB growth according to plan, that we’re going to spend consistent with our NSR and revenue growth.
So as we saw the first half play out, we had the luxury of two segments in our Americas and International margins that we’re delivering really strong margins. And the key thing I want to point out here is we’ve always talked about organic investments and why we prioritize them because they deliver more than 40% ROI and we make organic investments through our margin. This is a perfect example of that on how do we assess and make those organic investments. So when we saw – so strong margins coming through that first half of the year in International and Americas, we also saw to Troy’s point earlier, a pipeline in our largest market in America, that, that record high in all of our end markets, where our win rate are at 50%-plus and our enterprise critical pursuits were the largest projects, it’s more than 70%-plus.
So we decided to spend to take advantage of this robust pipeline. We decided to spend 50 bps more in the second quarter and 40 bps more than what we have planned year-to-date in Americas, so we can continue to deliver on margin growth into the future. It provides us more confidence not only in the second half, but as we even operate beyond FY2024 on strength of our business in terms of growth and margin delivery. Also just to clarify, sorry, Jamie, there’s no change in the guidance that we expect to deliver for FY2024. We will be delivering on our margin commitments.
Jamie Cook: Okay. I appreciate the time. Thanks, guys. Nice quarter.
Troy Rudd: Thank you.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Sabahat Khan from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Sabahat Khan: Great. Thanks, and good morning. I just wanted to get a little bit more color on the International side. There’s obviously been a lot of margin improvement there. I guess outside of just steady, maybe progress on the International side with you having pruned a lot of your international markets. Is there any kind of sizable chain, new end markets you might pursue? Just trying to get an idea of what sort of the next leg of improvement on the international side, could be margins are obviously now in double-digits for a few quarters now. Just trying to understand it will look more like a mature business now? Or if there’s any possible new strategy on that front? Thanks.
Troy Rudd: Thanks, Sabahat. I’m going to – I’m first going to just take the opportunities in our International markets and talk about that, and then I’ll turn over the margin question to Gaurav. But as we look across International markets, we see robust opportunities. And just to give you a sense of the opportunities that we realized this quarter. Our book-to-burn in the UK was 1.7 times. Our book-to-burn in Australia was 1.2 times and our book-to-burn in Canada was 1.1 times. And so that indicates that, again, we have healthy markets and we have healthy opportunities. And as we said in our prepared comments, we actually have seen our pipeline, our global pipeline continue to improve. In terms of what’s next for us, we are still working to drive an improvement or transform how we deliver our design work.
And we see that continuing to create an opportunity to take more market share. We’re going to continue to invest and expand in program management and advisory. And in particular, we have a focus on the energy markets. And so there’s nothing really new that we’re doing other than just continuing to advance the strategy that we set a few years ago, which is to expand the opportunity in our design business, to grow our advisory program management business, I mean continue to differentiate ourselves to create a competitive advantage and continue to take market share. And we see that as being sort of very equally distributed and then offer being equal around the world.
Gaurav Kapoor: And Sabahat, this is Gaurav. To your question on margins in the International, they’re very healthy. But I just want to clarify, as we have done before. Our expectations of what we will be delivering on International is not the status quo. Yes, we’ve experienced over 200 bps of margin growth year-over-year, quarter over – past year quarter to this year, but our expectations and ambitions are to be best-in-class, just like we are in the Americas and that’s what we’re marching to. So as you look to our near-term target that we’ve said the enterprise at a consolidated level will deliver 17%. And beyond that 17% plus margins, international is going to be a significant contributor of that margin growth through various initiatives, including the growth opportunities that Troy clearly laid out.
Those are going to be very important. And then when you combine that with how we use our enterprise capability centers, how we incorporate digital technologies into the delivery, all of those things are going to continue to expand our margins in international and at the enterprise level.
